PowerShell v3 Invoke-WebRequest: Troubles with forms

Question

Since I upgraded to Windows 8 a lot of my PowerShell scripts relying on launching an invisible IE won’t quite work anymore, so I tried switching to the Invoke-WebRequest

Answer 1

If you're me and have been troubleshooting a bad Web Request, in my case a -Body that was becoming null at my API, then you will want to know about the gotcha that is about interleaving your line continuations with comments. This

$r = iwr -uri $url `
    -method 'POST' `
    -headers $headers `
    # -contenttype 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' ` # default
    -Body $body

Notice the commented out line # -contenttype 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' # default

Putting a comment truncates the remaining back-ticked line continuation. Therefore, in my case my web request ended up with a request having 0-byte payload.